Mikael Fernström, 3/2/97
Music in folk-traditions has come a long way. In today's performances we hear echoes of the tradition of the past, but to what extent and how has the music tradition been influenced by our means of communicating the tradition? Irish traditional music was/is based on a strong aural tradition and in the last three centuries it has been influenced by many different outside forces. In this paper I would like to focus on the use of notation and how it might have affected the communication of the tradition. Secondarily I will try to suggest how modern information technology might be applied to improve our chances to capture the tradition of today.
The use of music notation can be very different depending on what context the notation is used in. In most primary traditions there is little need to annotate music as long as the aural tradition works, but as soon as we depart from the context - the community - the need for and use of notation increases. In a community, the elements of style form templates and sets of rules that can reduce the complexity of the notation itself. Style in this sense would encompass ornamentation, variation, phrasing, speed, intonation as well as key concepts such as types of tunes, for example jig, reel, etc.
A jig is a jig and a reel is a reel, and within the boundaries of each respective conceptual template it is often sufficient just to use notation that holds a series of pitches, perhaps with the addition of punctuation to mark notes that should have a longer duration. A musician that is familiar with the styles and concepts of a community can then perform the music, using the knowledge of the concepts and the information in the notation in a matrix-like way. The preconceptions that are communicated by the conceptual templates will shape the interpretation and performance of a series of notes that could be annotated in several different ways.
The western art music notation (staff notation) has been quite a stable and generic system for notation since the 17th century, with its origins in the horizontal line system of the 9th or 10th century. Before that, in prehistoric Greece, India and China tablatures in combination with numeric or alphanumeric notation was used [2]. Those methods of notation have also been, and are being used, in traditional Irish music. The main alternatives are alphabetical notation, numerical notation, graphic or numeric tablature and tonic sol-fa [3].
Annotating all details of a tune, with all its stylistic elements captured, can often result in a very difficult script to read and perform (and to understand). Just as John Cage remarked in his Freeman Etudes and Etudes Australes that he "wanted to make the music as difficult as possible so that performance would show that the impossible is not impossible" by having too many notes to play, a notation that captures the entire performance can be extremely complex. In this sense, the direction of western art music has been to create both aesthetics and virtuosity within the limits of staff notation (although Mr. Cage has often used other alternatives than traditional staff notation [4]).
The market and distribution/transmission of music has also affected the use of the notation in many different ways. When distribution and transmission goes outside the community it is often transplanted for performance on other instruments, etc. For example Buntings transcriptions of the Harp festivals in the 18th century must have been affected by Bunting himself was an organist and most musicians think of music in terms of their own primary instrument. Many piano arrangements of neo-Irish music in the 19th century must have had a strong influence on the music, transmitted in staff notation. First of all, arranging the tunes for piano [5] eliminates many elements of the original performance as there is for example no need to catch breath when playing the piano, compared to if it originally was a flute tune. Secondarily, being adapted for consumption by middle class young ladies in drawing rooms - amateur classical musicians - must imply that the arranger sometimes wrote down the tunes for the least common denominator in performance to allow as many as possible to be able to play the music.
It is interesting to compare this with the rich notation of the Sliabh Luachra 'Code', which clearly demonstrates that different ways of notation within a community, and also adapted for the particular instrument it originates on, can provide a more effective transmission of performance. Comparing the amount of visual information that has to be processed by a musician to learn a tune is to the advantage of O'Keefe's numeric tablature notation - the Sliabh Luachra 'Code'. His notation also preserves more of his performance, as the numbers indicate what fingers he used and the location of the number indicates which one of the four strings of the fiddle he used, and other graphical elements of the notation indicated the stroke of the bow [6]. Notation for transmission We can achieve notation literacy, but we have to go beyond reading notes to make music. There is a big difference between the art of performance and the technique of playing the correct notes. Notation can be used for transmission of both repertoire and performance. For mass market listening-consumption, today's music and audio technology is capable of capturing most elements of a performance. For a musician that needs to remember thousands of tunes, notation is often a practical way to get memory support. For the apprentice musician or interested amateur, it is advantageous if the notation also can reflect the performance. Modern art music has also moved on, and composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen have definitely broken the chains of staff notation [7].
The Sources of Irish Traditional Music [8] is soon about to be published in book-form, but it is also available (internally in the Irish World Music Centre) in digital form. The Sources contain almost 7000 Irish traditional tunes from 1724 to 1855. Each tune has been annotated in Finale format [9] and the tunes have been categorised based on a number of style and musicology elements. The musical notation in conjunction with the categorisation provides a very rich annotation, unfortunately mainly accessible to musicologists with classical training. If, or rather when, we convert the notation into for instance the MIDI (Musical Instruments Digital Interface) format, the digital Sources can then be made available to a broader audience, for use in learning and practice as well as pure appreciation of traditional Irish music. To illustrate these possibilities, I will here briefly describe some possible scenarios of use:
A musicologist can, of course, read the music in staff notation. With the Sources in MIDI format, the tunes can also be played back on a personal computer fitted with an audio card. The score combined with the categorisation can be made to play back the tunes according to their stylistic elements. This would give the musicologist both visual and aural to access the Sources.
With modern non-traditional instruments it has been possible for at least a decade to capture performance and record it as MIDI and the last couple of years several new methods and interfaces have become available that can convert the sound and actions of both the human voice and traditional instruments to MIDI [10]. This implies that it is possible to create a search mechanism that would allow users of the digital Sources to enter a search criteria as a fragment of a tune by for instance singing the fragment, and the fragment can then be normalised into intervals between each pair of pitches in the fragment, and finally automatically searched for in a digital version of Sources.
The Learner or amateur can, depending on personal ability, use the same access-methods as in the previous case, but the visual notation can be converted into other forms such as alphanumeric, numeric or graphic tablature, etc. In a digital version of Sources this would be almost as easy as changing font in a word processing program.
For the semi-skilled learner, it is always a problem to locate and identify in detail anomalies in personal performance. If working with a teacher, the learner often plays a tune and when finished the teacher comments on the performance. This process is difficult insofar that the learner and teacher will have to refer to past events. With a learner having the possibility to capture his or her own performance (as described above in searching) and to compare the performance with the information in a digital version of Sources, it is possible to provide accurate feedback in real-time to the learner and the differences can also be recorded for further analysis [11].
Finally, we should not expect miracles from modern technology as it also has limits and properties that cannot be compared to a real live music performance. For example when using computer software to quantize rhythmical structures, it often makes a tune sound sterile and artificial. The abilities that humans have to produce, appreciate and interact with music are, and will remain, well beyond the capabilities of technology.
Sliabh Luachra 'Code', (from Matt Cranith)
The same tune as above, in staff notation
An example of a tune viewed in Cakewalk, a MIDI program. Note that both staff notation and piano-roll notation can be viewed at the same time
An example of John Cage’s notation, Trumpet solo from a piano concert
An example of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notation, Helikopter-Streichquartett
[1] From Nicholas Harnoncourt, Le Discours Musical, my translation.
[2] Geoges Jean , L'écriture - mémoire des hommes, Gallimard, Paris 1987
[3] Niall Keegan, Literacy as a Transmission Tool in Irish Traditional Music, in Irish Musical Studies, P.F. Device & Harry White (Eds.), Four Courts Press, Blackrock, 1996, pp. 335-342
[4] John Cage: An Autobibliographical Statement, http://newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.html
[5] Sandra Joyce, An Introduction to O'Carolan's Music in Eighteenth-Century Printed Collections, in Irish Musical Studies, P.F. Device & Harry White (Eds.), Four Courts Press, Blackrock, 1996, pp. 296-309
[6] Matt Cranith, The Sliabh Luachra 'Code', in Irish Musical Studies, P.F. Device & Harry White (Eds.), Four Courts Press, Blackrock, 1996, pp. 343-353
[7] Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helikopter-Streichquartett, 1993
[8] first compiled by the late Aloys Fleischmann, completed by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin with the assistance of Paul McGettrick, in print.
[9] Desktop Publishing software tool from Coda Music Inc
[10] AutoScore from Wildcat Canyon Software Inc.
[11] Stephen W. Smoliar, John Waterworth, Peter R. Kellock, pinaoFORTE: A System for Piano Education Beyond Notation Literacy, ACM Multimedia, San Francisco, 1995. (My note: the pianoFORTE system is based on MIDI, hence it can be adapted to be used as described).